How America Can Quit Its Oil Addiction

[Link: Newsweek Issues 2009: Rules for a New World | Newsweek.com]
"Around this cheap and versatile fuel, the United States built an impressive civilization—one featuring universal car ownership, highways stretching to the horizon, endless suburban tracts, affordable airline travel, malls, Disneyland and other aspects of the American Dream. But the United States no longer produces enough oil to sustain this civilization—yet it continues to rely on petroleum for a huge proportion of its energy needs."

People who should now know better continue to proclaim that if we really don't want to base our energy consumption on petroleum and other hydrocarbon supplies we need only change our minds and start towards using something else. Something that won't involve complicated political maneuvering with despicable foreign despots. Something that won't continue to feed vast quantities of carbon compounds into our atmosphere causing ongoing climate change. Something that won't require us to modify our extravagant lifestyles. Something, in fact, that doesn't exist.

It isn't a matter of will. There are no technologies that can be scaled to provide the energy density we need to go on with our life as is. Our lifestyle is a hydrocarbon lifestyle. Even if we could build a new infrastructure to harness the wind from continents filled with windmills, convert all of our roofs to solar collectors and convert all of our agriculture into producing biomass to be converted to fuels, the resulting world would not be the same as we have now. We would not have the same mobility or lifestyle flexibility that we have now. We would not have the disposable energy wealth to spend as we have now. Such a world would be complicated and difficult because it takes energy to build energy production. We would be realizing a much smaller marginal energy gain from these new supplies. As I have pondered before, how would windmills be built if we only had windmill power to build them with.

We use our petroleum reality based mind to imagine a new non-petroleum world. Forgetting that we wouldn't have any petroleum to build it with.